In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Black Catholicism

Notes on Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeDoctor Faustus and the Art of Dying BadlyMaggie VinterMaggie VinterCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFaustus:Lucifer and Mephastophilis! Ah, gentlemen, I gave them my soul for my cunning.All:God forbid!Faustus:God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it.1What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to fix. Critics have plausibly interpreted the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to free-thinking iconoclasm.2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly and the godless, social superiors and inferiors, and angels and devils, all of whom offer different, and sometimes shifting, interpretations of the cosmos. These voices agree on almost nothing. Nothing, that is, except that Faustus’s bad actions will end in damnation.That Marlowe should emphasize the bald fact of Faustus’s badness over the religious context from which it emerges is all the more surprising because badness has traditionally been conceived in terms of privation or distortion. Augustine influentially defined evil as a departure from God.3 The Good is a unitary, positive attribute of divinity, which stands as both the source and the model for all goodness on earth. The Bad, as such, is nothing. Rather, different badnesses represent different, ever-multiplying perversions of the Good. This negative characterization of evil found new expression in the sixteenth century through the theology of Luther and Calvin, who offer broadly similar accounts of agency after the fall. The human will is at once entirely derivative and, when not illuminated by grace, irredeemably vicious.4 When Marlowe emphasizes Faustus’s depravity while obscuring the divinity it rejects, he perversely presents the consequence without the cause, the flawed reflection without the object that it mirrors.Perhaps, though, representational perversity is the point. In this article, I argue that theories of parody can help us understand such free-floating badness. From Julius Caesar Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridicula in 1560, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, parodic techniques have generally been understood as derogatory in intent.5 However, Giorgio Agamben suggests a fruitful alternative approach when he argues that parody might not simply deflate its target but could also function as a strategy for representing mysteries obliquely.6 To assess the value of Agamben’s ideas, I analyze Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus alongside another sixteenth-century dramatization of dying badly, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570). Both plays certainly use derogatory parody to ridicule characters who, at the last, are unable to relinquish worldly things. But they also suggest that parody can function as an investigative and representational tool, akin to a negative theology, that helps us to explicate obscured divinity through avowedly imperfect imitations. Marlowe and Wager share Calvin’s interest in depravity, but they reverse his emphasis.7 Instead of simply asserting that human will is irredeemably vicious, they ask what viciousness can reveal about the scope and limits of human agency or about the gap between fallen perception and divine truth. In particular, parody in their plays becomes a tool for analyzing and representing the approach to death, when the disjuncture between a person’s earthly and spiritual state can appear especially stark and especially in need of resolution.Furthermore, a focus on the affinities between parodic techniques and privative understandings of bad action can clarify the changing fortunes of religious theater in the sixteenth century. Between the publication of Enough Is as Good as a Feast around 1570, the writing of Doctor Faustus in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and the virtual prohibition on religious language onstage under the “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players” in 1606, a growing group of religious thinkers came to understand dramatic representation as an inherently blasphemous practice.8 While there is no necessary link between antitheatricality and predestinarian accounts of the will, both discourses share a common concern with how imperfect human imitations approach an unseen, perfect original. Moreover, many of the same Protestant thinkers who elaborated Augustine’s account of evil to deny the possibility of good works independent of God’s grace also engaged in polemic against drama.9 Enough Is as Good as a Feast can help explain this slippage, since it indicates how hard it is to inoculate any representation of a religious subject from charges of profanation. By the end of the play, the derogatory potential of parody subsumes its use as an investigative strategy, and all forms of mimesis risk being revealed as blasphemous. Wager himself seems to have become disenchanted with religious theater, since he abandoned dramatic writing toward the end of the 1570s even as he remained “active in the Anglican ministry well into the 1580s.”10This context suggests that in writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe was engaged not so much in secularizing religious forms as in reviving a dead genre abandoned by its original practitioners as unsatisfactory. His play, I argue, offers an implicit rejoinder to antitheatrical condemnations of drama. Marlowe appears to agree with the polemicists that dramatic mimesis necessarily offers a distorted, deficient version of what it imitates. But the theater’s representational badness reflects the ingrained badness of human performances generally, all of which are necessarily failed imitations of an inaccessible model. We are all doing what Faustus is doing. By foregrounding the validity of parody as a representational strategy for figuring otherwise unapproachable mysteries, and by attending to the forms of human agency that make such representation possible, Marlowe implies that drama is compatible with theological investigation precisely because of its blasphemous potential. The play encourages us to expand Scaliger, Bakhtin, and Agamben’s understandings of parody to theorize performances on the Elizabethan stage and beyond.Parody, Beside and BelowThe impulse to parody is ancient. The word itself derives from the Greek term parodos, which was probably initially used to describe any variant poem or song written beside an older work but took on particular connotations of comedy by the time Aristotle used it in the Poetics.11 Although the word (transliterated into Latin as parodia) and the concept disappeared from rhetorical manuals by the fifth century, a vigorous European tradition of adapting privileged genres or subjects for new ends persisted through the Middle Ages.12 The Coena Cypriani, celebrations of feasts of the fool, and drunkards’ and gamblers’ masses all manifest a particular appetite for burlesque revision, especially of sacred models. While modern critics have disagreed over the significance of these texts, Martha Bayless is persuasive when she emphasizes their diversity and cautions against any grand theory of medieval parody as prima facie orthodox or heterodox.13 The technique was everywhere, capable of advancing many ends.By the early modern period, though, parodies (especially of religious subjects) were attracting more controversy. Sixteenth-century discussions of parody focalized broader debates about the aesthetic and moral value of imitative art. Humanists revived parodia as a rhetorical term but altered its connotations to imply that imitation of a serious subject necessarily derogates that subject. In 1560, Scaliger influentially defined the word as “Rhapsodia inversa mutatis vocibus ad ridicula sensum retrahens” [rhapsody turned upside down, redirecting the sense toward amusing things with altered words].14 Where the Greek prefix para had suggested juxtaposition, Scaliger describes inversion and institutes a hierarchy between serious literature and comic travesty. Though ridicula may neutrally connote an amusing subject in Latin, Margaret Rose suggests Scaliger’s early modern English readers largely understood parody as derogatory.15 Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), for instance, describes parody as what would make something “absurder then it was.”16And this revaluation of parody was not confined to rhetorical theory. Over the same period that Scaliger’s construction of parody started to gain more widespread acceptance in literary contexts, religious reformers came increasingly to reject comic adaptations and inversions of religious motifs as blasphemous by definition. The Henrican state suppressed festivals of boy bishops in 1541, objecting that “boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit … rather to the derision than any true glory of god, or honour of His saints.”17 In 1583, Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses condemned surviving festivals of the Lord of Misrule in similar terms as “horrible prophanation[s] of the Sabboth.”18 Significantly, Stubbes’s objection to misrule immediately follows his more famous condemnation of theater on the grounds that “the blessed word of God, is to be handled reverently, gravely, and sagely with veneration to the glorious Majesty of God, which shineth therein, and not scoffingly, floutingly, and jybingly as it is upon Stages in Playes and Enterludes” (236). Stubbes’s direct intellectual inspirations are the antitheatrical Church Fathers, including Augustine, whom he cites in his own support (237). However, when he denies the possibility of any genuinely sacred theater, he evokes an older Platonic logic that sees all imitation as inherently duplicitous. Plato’s Republic depicts Socrates condemning the tragic poet as “in his nature three removes from the king [i.e., God] and the truth, as are all other imitators.”19 For Stubbes, the problem is not that playwrights sometimes choose to mock God. Rather, he suggests that it is impossible to talk about God on stage without mockery. Any attempt to represent a religious truth dramatically, no matter what the motive, will necessarily fall into blasphemy. Imitation is parody.Modern critics trying to account for the character of parody in the early modern era, or to explain the hostility it increasingly inspired, have most often drawn on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.20 Bakhtin essentially accepts Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridiculing inversion but revalues ridicule as a folk challenge to elite monoculture and a spur to social and aesthetic change. Parody provides “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them.”21 It defamiliarizes the object of representation and anticipates the development of novelistic heteroglossia by revealing the power of language as language (60–61). Applied to Elizabethan theater, Bakhtin’s account would align dramatic parody of religious models with subversive and secularizing impulses. Though elements of Bakhtin’s historiography have been questioned, the theoretical framework he proposes has remained powerfully influential and (superficially, at least) feels consonant with the iconoclastic, scoffing Marlovian persona evoked by documents like the Baines note.22Descriptions of parody as inversion, however, are by themselves inadequate to explain texts like Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Doctor Faustus. These plays sometimes exploit the deflationary capacity of imperfect imitation but at other points employ dramatic parody to explore theological problems or even to model orthodox behavior. As a corrective to Scaliger and Bakhtin, we might consider Agamben’s strikingly different claim that “parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance … parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing.”23 Departing from Scaliger—and effectively dismissing the dialogical play celebrated by Bakhtin as mere “fiction”—Agamben instead follows Plato in focusing on the relationship between the representation and the distanced reality it purports to stand for. However, he crucially revalues Platonic concepts. Where Plato asserts the hierarchical inferiority of representations, Agamben notes the prefix para implies a horizontal arrangement of original and copy. And where Plato rejects mimesis on the grounds of its imperfection, Agamben argues that avowed distortion has a sacralizing effect. When parody draws attention to its inability to display an object directly, it reverently casts that object as a mystery. Viewed in this light, the “liturgy of the mass, the representation par excellence of the modern mystery, [is] parodic,” and medieval scatological reworkings are respectful elaborations, rather than profanations, of liturgical form (42). Agamben rejects Bakhtin’s suggestion that parodies contest privileged forms and ideas from below and claims instead that they offer esoteric avenues to otherwise inaccessible truths.24 Reworking the terms that Stubbes uses to condemn the theater, we might say the scoffing, flouting, and jibing of players does not misappropriate or dampen the light of God’s majesty shining within his word, so much as it veils that light so that it can be looked on indirectly, without the risk of blindness.Although Bakhtin and Agamben’s accounts of parody are markedly different, I do not think we necessarily need to choose between them in all cases. Parody is capable of being deployed for many purposes and of appearing in many forms and many locations. It can emerge reverently beside or profanely below the object it mimics.25 Superimposing these two theoretical models, moreover, might be particularly helpful for understanding sixteenth-century texts. During this period, the reemergence of parodia as a topic of explicit consideration in rhetorical studies and the increased religious scrutiny of representation combined to render parody’s true position especially uncertain. Moreover, this uncertainty seems to have been recognized by at least some Elizabethan writers, who responded to it in markedly different ways. The ambiguous place of parody contributes to Stubbes’s distrust of scoffing mimesis. But to other writers struggling to depict ambiguous or dangerous subjects, the very instability of parodic forms might prove useful. To see just how useful, I now turn to representations of the bad death.Dying like a ProtestantIn many Christian traditions, death is something you do. Popular ars moriendi texts present death not just a misfortune to be suffered but also as a discipline to be studied or an action to be performed.26 From its inception in the fifteenth century, this homiletic literature of the good death troubled easy distinctions between activity and passivity and considered complex interactions between divine and human will.27 However, questions of how to die well became charged in new ways after the Reformation. The art of dying, like other devotional practices, became a site of sectarian controversy. Protestant reformers challenged many Catholic rituals such as the anointing of the sick and intercessory prayers.28 And polemicists from both confessions politicized the moment of death through highly publicized accounts of victorious martyrdoms29 and propagandistic accusations that dying leaders of rival sects had despaired or recanted.30 More fundamentally, popular predestinarian theologies threatened the conceptual basis of conduct books. The deathbed renders this theoretical challenge especially pressing, first, because the dying person’s diminished mental and physical capacity can make problems of human will more apparent and, second, because the moment of death was commonly understood to unmask the true distribution of agency between the human and the divine. Death reveals whether a person was always already saved or damned, and this revelation has two effects that are somewhat in tension with one another.31 On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of grace to salvation and the insufficiency of human endeavor. On the other hand, it encourages a reconceptualization of individuals’ earthly actions as direct expressions of their ultimate spiritual status. Their earlier moral vacillations must be retroactively reclassified either as true expressions of their election (or depravity) or as temporary and misleading departures from their essential nature. Sectarian disputes and doctrinal innovations did not destroy the genre of ars moriendi; indeed more, and more were by both Catholics and over the sixteenth and than But altered the nature of the moriendi from a broadly for the good work of a Christian to a site of over what both a Christian and a work could disputes about also had for the form of religious drama. The link between deathbed conduct and drama is in the of which itself as a how of to … in of a the approach to death the in ars moriendi texts by who between good and bad impulses. Elizabethan Protestant to this tradition to account for the that spiritual is William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast how this The play is a of a by earlier medieval had and claims that in the 1570s and predestinarian some focus to Their “the for a tragic within the of moral of the earlier a comedy into its of spiritual and the that there are between homiletic and earlier plays is in focusing on he the to which these plays or even the forms they as they new doctrinal Is as Good as a Feast on the between the by the Man and he himself with a and with his help is a and a As the to the Man is by God’s to with and a but he to On his deathbed he to a will but he the the and is by a between the saved and the that is but obscured for much of the toward appear he offers God the of all will not the death of as hath to the true I the from the I for to Enough which to in and and all other I do Man is a as such by his in this he scarcely like claims to with And his that God has the true implies a in position and about through the is by the term which implies that Man godly through to the word by itself does not prove Man is in bad of worldly and spiritual language is especially in texts focusing on things. Sixteenth-century for religious and documents had devotional while sometimes in religious devotional The in offers an to Wager’s the godly at the of his religious by a will to his and and even for the of The need for the godly to with the in in to for the of the fallen to themselves with spiritual character such as Man in the of a impulse the same as And the questions about whether the two can be end of the play they Wager uses a parody of the of the good death to the apparent between saved and with a is because it reveals a more The dying Man his through of godly behavior. he is by and However, most of them are the even a concern for his spiritual like he is with his However, Man a will that would help his to as she rather than support of The its as Man is from a spiritual simply as a once he himself of God’s initially of Man had like one of the by the end of the play his of godly is itself a of his Enough Is as Good as a Feast rejects the apparent of godly and in will to a hierarchy between The worldly death is as a failed imitation of the godly This of worldly and in which the parodies the the where the in the earlier of the play that Man is then then are that and goodness to the same and become to the For the between dramatic models on a and a predestinarian becomes perfect and of to predestinarian His moral indicates how earthly uncertainty of election the between the saved and the damned, while his fall into explicit parody the of that the of the the implicit understanding of parody Wager increasingly variant imitations as not comic but and then encourages the to retroactively an of inferiority to earlier implicit understanding of parody Agamben’s is by one more like first, to through seems like a for it appears like a departure from true Christian the ridicule evoked by death is to his earlier what had beside becomes is there is any necessary to this or Enough Is as Good as a Feast to suggest that all imitations are parodic and even can be as it is hard to what imitation could accusations of and to have a turn by religious writers from the turn in as I Wager may have Faustus these like older forms to new doctrinal and parody to between and However, his play from Enough Is as Good as a Feast in it is that there are to Where Enough the with Doctor Faustus to in terms of privation that the distorting effects of human for how the Good is or by Faustus and to appear more like a of uncertainty than a link to the The often as the version of the play, to Faustus’s perception of Christian through that the To the then I the And In the context of Faustus’s can be almost as a of negative theology that the divine through what it is any attempt to Faustus’s simply as a blasphemous inversion is by the variety of ways that he divine truth. Man a bad Faustus of dying His imitations of religious never their on a divine original. alternative to rather than that could But in their diversity and their to explicate their to that they focus attention toward what fallen human Faustus may even a of not to but to choose between different to parodic to death in Doctor Faustus a investigation of the and of Wager’s of parody with depravity into a condemnation of all Marlowe’s of between parodic religious and what can be for imitation or even because its distortion of its or Faustus in the to Enough Is as Good as a from parody as inversion to parody as Marlowe the play by as the of dramatic and then whether mimesis can be either as a or as a tool for representing religious The Faustus as an intellectual and the privileged of the sixteenth-century As Marlowe’s by two of the word and the of the as their The fact that Faustus has to for instance, he has and can its because Faustus it to any positive While he that the scope of its is by “the of his own seems by the he already and His does not into new but other of and the religious he from the mass that to the as he his with Significantly, Faustus’s performances initially stand

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Catholic Christianity and its imagery broke in on Mesoamerica suddenly in the 1520s and has been a pivot point of living and dying there ever since. But there is no simple story of an early formative stage and late decline in the history of Christian image shrines in New Spain. They began in the sixteenth century, haltingly; and with many shrines eventually scattered over a vast, broken terrain, local histories of Christian practice were bound to depart from models and prescriptions in Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, or less remote capitals and style centers. The weight of the European past and present in the development of Christianity and religious practices in New Spain was great, and diffusion from Catholic Europe lends some coherence to the history of image shrines, whether following European trends or working against them. But Europe, too, is a moving target, neither uniform nor fixed and finished in its religious culture. What, then, can be said with some confidence about the impact of European beliefs and practices on the development of those shrines? What changed where and when?

Ontwerpen en bouwen in de Hollandse stad

298 Short Notices inventories and the restauro equorum accounts, both being 'unique to the period of the three Edwardian kings' (p. 49). The horse inventories were compiled during the appraisal of mounts by royal officials when the feudal host assembled, then used as a working document during the campaign. The restauro equorum provided a record of horses lost during royal service. Given the mix of feudal and paid service to the Crown during this period, these sources cannot provide a complete record of all the m e n and mounts involved. Nevertheless, the information gleaned is impressive and provides insight into Edwardian military society, in particular the role of the warhorse. Although the destrier was bred specifically for mounted warfare, the disaster at Bannockburn was to force a paradigm shift in Edwardian military tactics. Rather than the massed charge, English armies would n o w deploy in defensive positions and fight dismounted. N o w the terrain and objectives of a campaign would influence the selection of mounts. For example, the chevauchee required hard riding, hardly a suitable role for the ponderous magnus equus, but one for which the hunter-bred courser was well suited. By the reign of Edward III, the actual battlefield value of the destrier had waned. Nonetheless, Ayton's research confirms that the cost of a horse continued to be a reliable indicator of the military and social status of the owner: 'No animal is more noble than the horse, since i t is by horses that princes, magnates and knights are separated from lower people' (p. 251). The text is informative and well, if somewhat dryly, presented, with extensive footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography. Graeme Cronin Ardross Western Australia Laursen, John Christian and Cary J. Nederman, ed., Beyond the Persecutin Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment, Philadelp University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; paper; pp. vi, 288; R.R.P. US$19.95, £18.95. This diverse collection of essays is an important contribution to th of toleration, not only in its detailed treatment of some authors and 299 subjects largely neglected in contemporary discussion, but especially because the editors have shaped the collection into a coherent structural whole with introductory essays to each section. The general introduction clearly establishes the editors' frame of reference and their polemical targets. Rejecting from the start the c o m m o notion that toleration is a kind of 'juggernaut through history that had to emerge to bring about modernity', their aim is to show that different theories and practices of toleration were contingent, local and surprisingly widespread from early times, and that in medieval and Early Modern Europe voices and practices in favour of toleration were present on a scale hitherto unappreciated. They take issue with a n u m b e r of myths, especially the 'Enlightenment stereotype' which regards John Locke as the inventor of modem toleration; the 'Inquisition cliche' which depicts the medieval and early modern period as a time of relentless persecution; the idea that in earlier times voices of toleration were always lonely souls crying in the dark; and the view that the growth of toleration was uniformly a product of secularisation. There is a healthy recognition that toleration was not limited to theories put forward in formal tracts, but emerged in m a n y places long before theories were developed, and that it could just as readily be based on a religious as on a secular world view. Paths to toleration came in many forms, practices and theories, providing no basis for a 'Whig history' of unilinear development from darkness to light, from persecution to toleration. Having established this framework, the editors present the collection of essays in three sections, covering respectively the medieval period, the 'long sixteenth century' (the 1490s to around 1640) and the seventeenth century, and each section is introduced by a short essay on the major events and contextual background of the period. The medieval section presents three individual studies—of Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury and M e n a h e m Ha-Me'iri—which call into question the view that medieval Christendom w a s a closed and monolithic persecuting society. The sixteenth...

[1] Though the changing nature of pitch organization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been the subject of significant scholarly debate, few studies address analogous changes in rhythmic organization in this period.(1) Two recent books, Ruth I. DeFord's Tactus, Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music (2015) and Roger Matthew Grant's Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era (2014) have begun to fill this void. Both studies explore how hierarchy accrues in mensural structures, providing a compelling link to our understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meter (i.e. Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983, Hasty 1997, London 2004). For his part, Grant synthesizes the intellectual foundations of theories of musical time from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and documents technologies (including the tactus, the timepiece, and the metronome) that correspond with changing articulation of musical time. In his discussion of mensural music, Grant draws on an Aristotelian notion of time to argue that tactus articulates a mensural hierarchy.(2) DeFord similarly focuses on tactus and takes a more practical approach, examining in detail the theory and practice of temporal organization in Renaissance music.(3) DeFord provides a compelling account of the nuances of mensuration, illuminating the unique contributions of mensural organization to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music and revealing the vibrant hierarchical patterns that mensural theory and practice encourage.[2] DeFord begins her study by debunking the false binary between meter and mensuration:The term "mensural music" (musica mensurabilis) means simply "measured music." In the period under consideration, it was the opposite of "plainchant" (musica plana). Modern scholars sometimes treat it as the opposite of "metrical music." This is a false dichotomy based on an oversimplified view of the difference between "Renaissance rhythm," in which the system of measurement is sometimes alleged to have no relation to rhythmic structure, and later styles, in which time signatures and barlines are sometimes assumed to prescribe structures in a straightforward manner. This reductive opposition does not do justice to the music of either era. (2)The book demonstrates this point exquisitely, illustrating the analytical potential of mensural structure and emphasizing critical commonalities between so-called mensural and metrical music. DeFord defines rhythm as "a more complex concept than mensuration or tactus. It includes all aspects of the perceptible organization of musical time, especially on the relatively small scales in which durations can be directly compared in memory. Since all musical events take place in time, all of them contribute to rhythm" (3). Her book aims "to shed light on the theory and practice of rhythm in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by examining them in relation to each other" (1). She undertakes this project in two parts: chapters 1-7 consist of close readings of over 100 theoretical sources, and chapters 8-14 provide seven case studies ranging from the early songs of Du Fay through the virtuosic L'homme arme masses of Ockeghem, Busnoys, and Josquin to the popular songs that flourished through the second half of the sixteenth century. DeFord's exploration of disparate sources reveals a rich tapestry of rhythmic practices that affect details ranging from large-scale organization of a mass movement to nuances of text setting at the level of the single word.[3] Building on the groundwork of Berger 1993, DeFord untangles the often contradictory details of theoretical writing on mensuration, ranging from the mid-fourteenth century Ars practica mensurabilis cantus of Johannes de Muris through Michael Praetorius's Syntagma musicum (1618-19). She argues that "the functional mensural structure of a piece depends on regularities in the audible rhythmic structure, not on the notated mensuration" (50). …

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

REVIEWS 353 'European'pretensions under Peter I and his successors,the argument about itsbackwardnessinstantlyacquiredvalidity. The few criticismsI have are related not to the author's treatment of the subject of the book as such, but rather to particular details and certain emphases scatteredin the text. Displaying an excellent in-depth knowledge of the history of Muscovy/Russia, some confusion on the part of the author seems to creep in when it comes to paralleldevelopments in otherpartsof the East Slaviclands. Forinstance, someone familiarwith the complexities of East Slavic ethnonyms should avoid a bold usage of the term 'Ruthenians' in the following context: 'Over the first millennium the Russians or Ruthenians' (p. I5). Likewise, talking about Ukraine in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is inadvisable to refer to it as 'the periphery of Russia' (p. 62), given that at that period Ukraine's territory formed a part of PolandLithuania .At the same time, this concept is quite legitimate in the context of the eighteenth century (p. I5o). Also to a virtual 'slip of the pen' must be attributedthe statement that the BelorussianSymeon Polotskywas educated at the 'Moghilev college' (p. 83): it should of course read 'the Kiev Mohyla College'. Finally,a passage attemptingto explain Orthodox Russia'sisolation from the rest of the Christendom by the Tatar invasion (p. I 77), appearstoo passefor a workof such fine quality. All having been said, Lestroischristianismes etlaRussieis a very good book. I should recommend it to all experts in the field of early modern Russian history, and all interested in the ways differentcultures approach and assess each other. The work servesas yet another reminderto all of us that 'cultural history is perpetual mistranslation',which only makes it the more interesting to studentsand scholarsalike. Combined Departments ofHistory L. V. CHARIPOVA University College Dublin Plokhy,Serhii. The Cossacksand Religionin EarlyModernUkraine.Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford and New York, 200I. x + 40I pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [48.oo. FOR anyone seeking to investigate the origins of the Ukrainians'sense of self, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is when a 'Ruthenian', or early modern Ukrainian, national identity firstproperly emerged. Serhii Plokhy's excellent monographprovidesapenetratinganalysisof themanycontroversies and possibilitiesof the period. It also helps the reader by placing them in the comparative context of modern historiography on 'the upheaval of the European Reformation, which led to the confessionalizationof religious and civic life throughoutthe continent' (p. 3). Plokhy'sbasic argumentabout his subjectmatteris that 'Ruthenianidentity was in constant flux duringthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries'(p. I 3). It was torn between confessionalization's 'outstanding role in the ideological substantiation and international legitimation of Cossack statehood' and its tendency to 'foster [. ...] a sense of belonging to one Orthodox ecumene (Christianitasorthodoxa)' (pp. I 2 and i i). There was no manifestdestinydrawing 354 SEER, 8i, 2, 2003 the Cossacks and/or the Ukrainian Orthodox towards Russia. Plokhy cites the examples of Hetman Petro 'Sahaidachny'scampaign against Muscovy in I6i 8, and the participationof Cossackforcesin the SmolenskWar (I632-34) [which] are all evidence of the opportunismof Cossackpolicy with regardto Muscovy' (p. 277). The well-knownparadox (at least in Westernscholarship) that the ideology of EastSlavicunitywasfirstdeveloped in the southis skilfully investigated, but so is the irony that it was not necessarily well-received or even understood in the north before i 654. 'Even as ZakhariiaKopystensky referred in his Palinode[written I621-22] to the religious affinity between Polish-LithuanianRus' and Muscovy, that affinitywas resolutely denied in Moscow', Plokhyargues(p. 297). The author also provides an excellent analysis of the main counterpoint, namely the gradualbut crucial adoption of an '"expanded" treatmentof the concept of the Ruthenian nation' Metropolitan Jov Boretsky'sidea of a 'nation of Ruthenian worship' (pp. I63-64) whilst stressingthat differing conceptions of ethnicity, classand religion did not alwaysnecessarilycoincide (Boretskyalso being something of a Moscow-phile). Plokhyis thereforea long way from idealizing the relationshipbetween the variousbranchesof Ruthenian society. 'Fora whole host of reasons',he states, 'prior to the Khnelnytsky Uprising [in I648] the alliance of the Kyivan hierarchy with the Cossack elite proved relatively short-lived, failing to consolidate a linkbetween Cossackdomand the Old Rus' traditionin politics and culture' (p. 237). Nevertheless, there can be no mistaking the radical natureof the Kyivanprojectin thereligioussphere,especiallyunderMetropolitan Petro Mohyla (I633-47) a...